"Colin's been a fantastic football player, and he's going to continue to be," Carroll said. "At this time, we didn't do anything with it, but we know where he is and who he is and we had a chance to understand him much more so. He's a starter in this league. And we have a starter.

"But he's a starter in this league, and I can't imagine that someone won't give him a chance to play."

That is a weird reason not to sign a quarterback, right? Especially when it's the Seahawks we're talking about. Carroll and John Schneider have routinely embraced competition during their tenure in Seattle -- they found their franchise quarterback in Russell Wilson because they allowed Wilson, a third-round rookie quarterback, to compete against Matt Flynn, who signed a big contract in free agency.

Wilson was the better quarterback and it resulted in the Seahawks winning a Super Bowl because he was a perfect complement to Marshawn Lynch and an all-time great defense.

Florio also makes an interesting point: Could the Seahawks be worried about Kaepernick sitting behind Russell Wilson?

Instead, the Seahawks have made the strategic decision not to add a player they regard as starting-caliber because they have a starter. While that could change if their starter suffers a serious injury, the reluctance of a team driven by competition to embrace a competitive option seems odd — unless the Seahawks don't want to have an in-house option to which the Russell Wilson Resenters can point if/when he struggles during the regular season.

"I think it was an old story that was revisited," Carroll said recently. "I don't even know where all the stuff came from. I would say this. I've said this to you guys before: The big wins are just as hard as the big losses if you let it be. Our first Super Bowl was a challenge to get back from. Our second Super Bowl was a challenge to get back from. That's just how it is. It's that impacting and if you've noticed, most teams don't make it back. The odds are you don't make it back to where you've been."

There's also an angle that wasn't really touched on heavily while we were all pointing to the Seahawks as a logical destination for Kaepernick. What if Wilson doesn't want to be teammates with his old rival?

Seattle battled HARD against the 49ers for a few years when Jim Harbaugh was having success in the Bay Area. From 2011 through 2014 it was arguably the best rivalry in the NFL. That was primarily because of Harbaugh vs. Carroll, but the discovery of Wilson and Kaepernick helped fuel those teams to new heights and helped foster a bitter rivalry.

That would be a perfectly reasonable and logical explanation to keep Kaepernick off the roster. There's no need to make the starting quarterback unhappy with the backup situation. But it is odd that the Seahawks might eschew maximizing competition at any position, which appears to be the case if they're unwilling to bring on Kaepernick because he's too good to be a backup.

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Will Brinson joined CBS Sports in 2010 and enters his seventh season covering the NFL for CBS. He previously wrote for FanHouse along with myriad other Internet sites. A North Carolina native who lives...
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